The Emergence of a Hero A Tale of Romantic Love in Russia around 1800

The Emergence of a Hero is dedicated to the history of Russian emotional culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - the epoch when the court Masonic lodges and literature were competing for the monopoly on the 'symbolic images of feeling' that an educated and Europeanised Russian was supposed to interiorize and reproduce. The case study in the centre of the study is the story of the life and death of Andrei Turgenev (1781-1803), the author of a confessional diary, a gifted poet, and an early Russian Romantic who failed to live up to the principles and models he cherished. Brought up on the patterns of emotions he found in works of Rousseau, Sterne, and the authors of Sturm and Drang, he soon found them too narrow for his individuality, and navigated towards a more mature nineteenth century Romanticism, but was not able to make this transition. Turgenev experimented not so much in his literary work as in his life. The reconstruction of this convoluted and enigmatic case is based on archival research and innovative analysis of individual emotional experience.

Andrei Zorin, Professor and Chair of Russian, University of Oxford

Andrei Zorin has been Professor and Chair of Russian at the University of Oxford since 2004. His publications include By Fables Alone: Russian Literature and State Ideology of the Last Third of the XVIII - First Third of the XIX centuries (2014), On the Periphery of Europe: The Self-Invention of the Russian Elite (with Andreas Schönle, 2018), scholarly editions of Russian classics, and more than 200 articles in English, Russian, French, German, Italian, and Finnish.